


joy of your desiring

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Hanukkah, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Other, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Spoilers - Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 01:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5271578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's winter holiday season, which to two thirds of the Dreemurr household usually signifies suffering. Thankfully, this year Frisk has a brilliant plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	joy of your desiring

**Author's Note:**

> _(I am selfish, private, and easily bored._ – little white scars like ghosts)
> 
> this fic takes place at least ten years after canon; the trio are all goofy twentysomethings here.
> 
> the title is a pun on chara's name, which i recently learned happens to be the greek word for joy (χαρά).

You weren’t really paying attention to the TV anyway, since you were talking to Asriel about ambassador stuff, but when it snaps off you jump a little. So you twist around in your seat to see what’s going on, and there’s Chara with the remote in their hand and a scowl on their face.

“What’s up?” you call.

They make a soft angry noise, kind of like a cat, and it would be cute if not for the daggers they’re glaring into space.

“If I have to see one more Christmas sale commercial I swear I am going to do a violence,” they grit out. “God. Let me _live.”_

You glance over to Asriel, who is making the same cringey sympathetic look you’ve got on your face. “Ahh.”

“I cannot fucking believe we are going to have to deal with this for an entire month,” they whine, and drop the remote to slide bonelessly down in the armchair, legs splaying out at the usual weird angles. “You come into _my_ house…”

If they’re still feeling lighthearted enough to meme about it, that’s a good sign, but you know that bone-deep weariness in their voice, and it’s not even December yet. It’s concerning. You raise your eyebrows at Asriel. He shrugs at you, like what do you want him to do, and you shrug back.

Monsters aren’t really religious, generally speaking. Underground they had the angel prophecy and its different interpretations, and that was about it. You like that about them—even though it’s not like your birth parents actually taught you much, growing up as the only Jewish kid in the immediate neighborhood was… not a good experience, to say the least.

(And it was probably even worse when Chara lived amongst the humans here. Just thinking about it makes you feel kind of sick to your stomach, so you try not to.)

But in the years since the barrier was broken and monsters settled back in on the surface, a lot of them wound up celebrating Christmas casually as a way to fit in. It’s pretty close to their Gyftrot-inspired customs of trees and presents, so it was a good way to create cultural rapport.

It _does_ mean that you and Chara have had to suffer through a lot of Christmas spirit even amongst monsterkind, though. Even you feel kind of alienated, after a while. And Chara’s not as patient as you are.

“I can’t even wait for all the neighbors to start decorating,” they say, voice flat with sarcasm. “I’m feeling stabby just thinking about it.”

“Please don’t actually stab anybody, hon,” says Asriel.

Chara lifts their head up enough to give you both a long-suffering look and then slumps back down onto the cushion. “Ree, you know your mom just called me up today to ask me to make her a Christmas sweater? Because her school is doing _festive_ things and she wants to look _presentable_ or whatever.” They make the angry cat noise again. “Let me _live—”_ and they draw the last word out, hard and frustrated. Then they push themself back up with both arms, scooting their butt back to sit in the chair like a reasonable person.

“You know,” you say thoughtfully.

“Uh-oh,” Asriel mutters. You ignore him.

“If our neighbors are going to be obnoxious, I think we should be too,” you go on.

Chara gives you a dubious eyebrow. You get up from the dining room table.

“Like—I don’t mean we need to deck the house out in silly yard ornaments or anything,” you say, bouncing over the carpet to Chara’s chair, the better to look down at them with excitement. “But if you have to make Mom a hideous embarrassing Christmas sweater, you ought to make us hideous embarrassing Hanukkah sweaters too.”

Chara actually starts to laugh. (You grin down at them.) _“Frisk._ My sweaters are not hideous, first of all. And also: _What.”_

“I’m serious!” You plant both hands on the armrest, lifting one foot off the floor as you lean more of your weight onto your wrists. “You should make us sweaters, so we can passive-aggressively wear them all over the place when we have to go outside. You’re all _about_ passive-aggression. It’ll be great.”

“You say this as if I’m actually going to go outside at all this December,” Chara retorts. “Also, while interacting with monsters is still infinitely preferable to interacting with humans, let me tell you how much I’m _not_ looking forward to explaining the Meaning Of Hanukkah (and also my whole religion, probably) to a bunch of curious goys.”

“Chara, you explained it to _us,”_ Asriel butts in. Both of you turn towards him—he’s still sitting at the table, one leg crossed over the other, steepling his big fingers and watching your back-and-forth lovingly. “Back when you hated talking to people even more than you do now, too.”

You swivel back to Chara, who flaps a hand, dismissive. “That was different. I knew you and Toriel and Asgore already. I knew you were asking because you, like… actually gave a shit?”

“I’ll do all the explaining, promise,” you chip in. Chara looks at you through their hair. Their eyebrows say that they’re not convinced, but they’ve got their lower lip folded under their teeth just a little bit and their mouth’s tense like they’re trying real hard not to smile. You have probably already won this argument; it’s just a matter of getting them to admit they’re caving. _“Aaaaaaand_ I’ll go down to the crafts store to buy you really nice yarn. I’ll phone chat with you the whole way so you can see everything and tell me what to buy without having to actually come with.”

Chara groans—longing or exasperation, or maybe both—and lets their head loll back against the chair. “Ree, help me talk this menace out of their idiot plan.”

“Actually, I want a hideous sweater too,” Asriel says brightly. Chara makes a disgusted face while you grin at him. “Uh, not a religious one, necessarily, just in the same colors for solidarity, if that’s okay?”

“Why do I live in a house full of enablers,” Chara laments. “Okay. You do realize that we are so ass-deep in Christian central that we _literally have to order Hanukkah candles online,_ right? It’s even worse than it used to be.”

“Really?” you ask.

“You sound surprised,” they say, thick with irony, and sigh. “There was _one_ time, when I was really little—she snuck me out to look for candles, and it took us a lot of stores but we did find some in the end. They were shitty cheap ones, but still.” They shrug. “Then my old man came home from his business trip early and we never tried to celebrate again. If I ever asked about Jewish stuff after that, she’d take his side. I thought—to protect me, maybe, but no. She was just throwing me under the bus to suck up to him. They threw everything out, too. The hanukiah, the dreidels—the seder shit and everything else too. Not the candles.” They smile, long and thin and nasty. “You don’t want to know what those got used for.”

Well, you remember all the different ways Toriel safety-proofed her house, so you can guess. You lean further over the armrest, wait to see if Chara will take offense at your intrusion into their personal space, and then veer in the rest of the way to kiss the corner of their mouth.

(They’re testing you, probably, you think. They do this sometimes, dredge up old horrors from the ten years they spent on the surface, and they do it with the relish of a kid flipping a rock over to show you something gross underneath it, waiting for you to squirm. Like they have to dare you to love them in all their ugliness, to prove to themself that you really do care.

It’s silly of them, but they’re only scared. You’ve learned to just switch over to comfort and reassurance as smooth as you can. They’ll figure out they don’t have to hurt themself like this eventually. Until then, you’ve just got to be patient and make sure to keep showing them that you love them.)

Chara relaxes under your touch. You hear the distant creak of a chair and then padding footsteps, and when you turn your head to the side there’s Asriel, kneeling down in front of Chara and resting his elbows on either armrest. Chara raises one hand to your face and rubs their thumb over your cheekbone, and sets their other hand in Asriel’s.

“People know better than to mess with Frisk and me,” Asriel soothes. “And you’ll be staying here inside, ‘cause you’re such a homebody. It’ll be fine. You’re safe.”

This makes Chara huff out a little. “When did I ever say that’s what I was worried about.”

Both of you just look at them. They roll their eyes so hard their chin cocks back, and they make a long, drawn-out _uuuuugggghhhhhh_ worthy of your mom’s students.

“Chara, pleeeeeeease make us obnoxious ugly Hanukkah sweaters,” you say, beaming cuteness at them. “We’ll go give bigoted gentiles hernias in them and teach monsters new stuff and remind everybody that this is our town too. It’ll be great.”

 _“Frisk,”_ Chara says, starting to laugh again as if in disbelief.

“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease,” you cajole. “I’ll make you latkes and apple compote every single night of Hanukkah until you get sick of them, and I’ll buy cheap plastic dreidels and we can teach Asriel how to play so we can kick his butt at it—” (“Hey,” Asriel tries to interject, but you ignore him) “—and we can teach our friends goofy Hanukkah songs that _aren’t_ the dreidel one, and I won’t complain when you meme on everyone. Please please _pleeeeeeeeease.”_

“Frisk, oh my god,” Chara says between giggles. “Frisk, _no.”_

You lean in and smooch them until they turn red. (From your peripheral vision, you can see that Asriel has lifted Chara’s left hand into his own so that he can nuzzle their scarred palm. You shift so that you can hold out your left hand behind the armrest for a triumphant fistbump—this is honestly the best part of this whole relationship, getting to double-team one or another of your partners with love and affection. Heck, so is being on the receiving end of said double-teaming.)

Now that they’re satisfactorily quiet, you lift your mouth from theirs long enough to stare at them literally nose to nose and say, “I will also buy you gelt for all eight days, cross my heart and hope to die.”

Chara narrows their eyes and jabs you in the chest with a businesslike finger. “Get me the really _good_ stuff, none of that milk chocolate BS, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

You fling your arms into the air and squeal. “You’re the best!”

They tilt their chin up, the better to look down their nose at you, you guess; and they smirk at you like this was all their idea from the start. “Of course I am.”

They settle their hand on your shoulder, and lean in to bite your mouth gently in the way that gives you the good tingles. It’s just getting nice when Asriel shoots up from the floor to push his fuzzy snoot into matters. Maybe he’s feeling left out.

Chara turns from you (unfortunately) to push at his chest, laughing. “Ree, no, you’re too heavy, you’re gonna knock the chair over!”

“I’ve got this, don’t worry,” he says, grinning, and you lean against his warm cheek because who _cares_ as long as you all get to cuddle, anyway.

“This does not inspire any confidence whatsoever!” Chara says, kind of shrill, but they’re still grinning, so you know they don’t mind.

(Between the three of you, in the end you do knock the chair over. It’s worth it.)

 

 

Much, much later, when Chara has already gone to sleep and it’s just you and Asriel sitting side by side near the bedroom’s tiny fireplace, he says without turning to you—“Hey Frisk, you’ve seen Dad’s Santa suit, right?”

You raise your head and look up at him. Even with the fire on one side of you and Asriel on the other, it’s cold; you are beginning to regret your laziness in just throwing a shirt on and grabbing one blanket, but also you don’t want to get up because it’s super comfy and you’d feel bad if you woke Chara up. They don’t get as much deep sleep as they need, and you’re a little worried those dark circles of theirs are gonna get to be permanent sometime soon.

So you just snuggle closer and shrug your unoccupied shoulder. “Yeah. When we were first looking around New Home, Chara actually pointed it out to me.”

Asriel keeps on staring into the distance. “You know, that was actually something Dad did for Chara. They’d only been with us for a couple months, and they were still really shy and jumpy back then. Dad knew from living on the surface, and from books, about Santa Claus. So he had Mom make the suit as a surprise for Chara, and…”

You pull a face, sure you know where this is going. “It didn’t go over well?”

Asriel smiles, soft and sad. “Actually… Chara played along with it to spare Dad’s feelings, or they tried to. They knew Dad was trying. I still remember how weird they acted back then—like they didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. I didn’t really get it at the time, but thinking back on it now…”

“I sort of get it too, I think,” you say, and breathe on your hands to warm your fingers up. “When I was little I basically got the whole Santa thing shoved down my throat by everyone around me, but they all still made sure I knew that it wasn’t for me. Then there’d be school things where I could actually get free food and keep myself fed because of Christmas charity drives, and I’d be expected to participate in all the Christmas-themed assignments and such... because they’d just assume that I believed in the same things as them unless I told them different. So even when I did get to be included, it never felt real. I spent a lot of time longing for the things other kids had from the outside, but then when those things were offered to me it wasn’t for a sincere reason most of the time, so it made me suspicious and angry.

“And it sounds like it was worse for Chara than it was for me, considering how long ago it was, so…”

Asriel makes a low considering noise. “Human society is… complicated.”

You shrug your free shoulder again. “Well—if Chara hadn’t appreciated the thought, I don’t think they would have pointed that outfit out to me while we were exploring. Even if they’re pretty salty on Christmas in general. And for what it’s worth, you guys were coming from a much more genuine place than the grown-ups around me.”

It’s quiet for a while, and you listen to the faint noises Asriel’s magical flames make in the fireplace.

“Anyway, I’m glad you came up with such a good idea,” he says. “I brought this up because I get the feeling that… Chara’s been an outsider for a long time, in lots of different ways. There are some things that we can’t do anything about, but at least this is one way we can make them feel included.”

You bump your head against his arm and grin. “Well, hopefully it works out like that, anyway.”

Then you shiver, which makes Asriel frown at you.

“Maybe you should get to bed,” he says.

“I probably should,” you admit. “You too. Chara’ll get cold, after all.”

Asriel sighs in a put-upon way, still smiling. “I should’ve known you were only interested in me for my… _hot body.”_

You groan. “That was _terrible.”_

“Okay, look,” he says, his grin giving him away. “I’m tired here, too.”

 

 

Asriel’s sweater, when it’s completed, is a modest blue with white trim. It’s large enough for you and Chara to fit into together, since he’s so huge (you test this out to find it’s not an exaggeration, over Asriel’s protests that you’ll stretch it out and Chara’s assurance that you won’t). It actually looks like it’s a normal sweater.

Chara’s is white with rows of blue Stars of David over the chest and arms. When Asriel asks them if it isn’t a little bit childish, their lofty reply is “It’s patterns, not stripes, so it’s fine.” Which you think probably just means that they didn’t think of that and don’t feel like meticulously undoing the whole sweater just to change it now. You can’t blame them. They look cute in it, anyway, which is the point.

But yours.

_Yours._

“This is the most obnoxiously eyesearing combination of colors I have ever beheld in my entire life,” you say, fondly regarding the horrible clash of neon yellow and cerulean that makes up the menorah plastered across the chest of your new sweater. “I _love_ it. The only way this could be any more perfect is if you could actually make it light up.”

Chara pauses in tucking their knitting needles behind their ear to snort. “Frisk, I’m not sewing lightbulbs into a yarn sweater. That’s what we call a fire hazard.”

You plant your hands on your hips and give them your best shit-eating grin. “You can’t spell ‘Frisk’ without—”

“Without ‘risk’, yes, we _know,”_ Chara and Asriel say in perfect unison, Asriel shaking his head and Chara rolling their eyes.

“But the fact remains that I am not sewing lightbulbs into your sweater, because I care about your safety for some strange reason that is escaping me at this particular moment,” Chara goes on. “If you want a light-up hanukiah on your sweater, you should probably learn how to knit your own self one.”

You lean in to peck their cheek, and laugh when they swat you away. “I’m just giving you a hard time,” you say. “I love it, really. It’s the most endearingly ugly thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Thank you so much.”

“You’re, uh, welcome, I guess?” Chara says, spreading their hands wide in fond disgust. “Take this abomination I have wrought and go forth and do… good deeds or whatever with it? Yes? You’re so weird.”

“Absolutely,” you say, and you pull the sweater over your head and bow while Asriel laughs and applauds, Chara shaking their head at you all the while. “First, though, I have to go out and shop because we seriously don’t have enough potatoes to cover a whole week’s worth of latkes.”

“You _did_ promise,” Chara says helpfully, adopting an air of affected innocence that kind of makes you want to do an Undyne and noogie them.

Instead: “I did,” you acknowledge readily.

“Iiiiiiii will go dig up the car keys,” Asriel says, grinning wide enough to show all his teeth. And he sidles out, both of you watching him go.

You keep staring after him, listening to him shuffling through everything on the foyer table, until an elbow in your ribs makes you stumble. You tilt your head to the side to find Chara watching.

“Happy now?” they ask you, eyebrows raised, one corner of their mouth lifted just a bit higher than the other, folding their lower lip between their teeth while they wait for your response. The look they’re giving you is equal parts indulgent and amused.

For your part, you just let the smile bubble up without trying to hold it in. “Yeah,” you reply. “I am.”

Because Chara already seems so much livelier now. That’s what matters most, to you.

**Author's Note:**

> kamimi drew [beautiful fanart of the ugly sweaters](http://kamiemieomio.tumblr.com/post/134185202736) and my life is now complete tbh


End file.
